The UN human rights office has issued a report detailing what it calls Israel's systemic discrimination against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and said the situation has drastically deteriorated over the past three years.
Israeli laws, policies and practices were having an asphyxiating impact on every aspect of daily life for Palestinians and violated an international convention against racial discrimination, it said.
This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before, High Commissioner Volker Türk warned.
Israel dismissed the accusations as absurd and distorted.
The Israeli mission in Geneva stated that the UN human rights office completely ignores fundamental facts regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and accused it of issuing another unmandated report that unfairly vilifies Israel.
Since 1967, Israel has built approximately 160 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where about 700,000 Jews live alongside an estimated 3.3 million Palestinians. The UN regards these settlements as illegal under international law.
The report signifies the first instance where a UN human rights chief has directly compared Israeli policies in the West Bank to apartheid, emphasizing the worsening conditions for Palestinians across various daily activities affected by discriminatory laws and practices.
Every negative trend documented in the report has continued to accelerate, and the consequences worsen for Palestinians daily, Türk stated.
